Last night I was reading a book that’s only tangentially related to running a bagel shop – The Food Truck Handbook by David Weber – and it got me thinking about something new in my transparency push: Metrics.
Three of the key metrics that he discusses in the book are COGS – cost of goods sold, Average Purchase per Customer, and Maximum Customers Served per Hour. All three are interesting questions. COGS gets increasingly interesting when you start considering all the costs involved – financial, ecological, social… and I don’t know that you’ll ever manage to pin it down perfectly, but isn’t it worth giving it a shot?
Plus, with those three together, I’ll get a good sense of how many people we’ll need to connect with on a daily basis to keep our business alive.
All of which got me thinking about other potential metrics. That thinking sent me down an internet rabbit hole. There are a lot of potential metrics to consider. Here’s a collection of links that I spent entirely too much time progressing through…
Motley Fool – 17 Business Metrics to Track in 2021
Some good ideas here. I’ll be looking at this a lot going forward
Harvard Busines Review – Don’t be Tyrannized by Old Metrics
I enjoyed this article and I like the idea of having metrics with a bit more soul.
And then I started running down a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rabbit hole. This one is fuzzy in the extreme and from what I was able to glean, a whole bunch of the metrics seem directed at specific industries. So. When we get it all together, we’ll ask for help to figure out our energy costs, ways that we can better deal with water and waste, where we get our supplies and equipment, and how we can better connect with and support our community. All of which is a lot. There’s a lot there and we’re not going to be anywhere near perfect. But maybe we’ll push in the direction of perfection and maybe we can bring along a few of our peers for the ride. Wouldn’t that be something.
Anyways, there’s a long rambling post. To paraphrase: There are lots of metrics in business that I had barely considered. It’s worth measuring them, and seeing how they progress over time. That might mean a little more work in the initial stages to make sure that we are actually measuring things, but over the long term, could make our lives easier. Also, there are lots of things that we can measure that will help us to push towards being better members of society and better stewards of the earth. So we’ll look at measuring those too.
As always, we’ll try to make all of that data freely available.
